Prep Comms - Storm Comms

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

The best time to prepare was yesterday, the next best time to prepare is Now! In this episode Caleb (K4CDN) discusses the importance of Preparing your Comms today for any storm that comes your way. Hurricane Debby is inbound as I produce this program, and we're getting ready in SC. This short list is just a reminder for you to get your plans together now! **You will notice this list doesn't mention water/food/shelter - just communications.** Essential Communication items include: Comms Plan Phone Charger Charging Cables Written List of Contact Numbers Functional Flashlights AM/FM Radio Extra Batteries Weather Radio Walkie-Talkies with Spare Batteries Laptop/Tablet Backup Chargers M.A.D. Gear Co: Contengency Planners Show Sponsor: Hub City Mercantile: Water Filters at 15% off and free shipping with code: AJM15   Blog post of interest: https://hamradionetwork.com/blog/hurricane-season-shortwave-radio-listening   https://hamradionetwork.com/blog/hurricane-listening-radio-freq-megalist   https://hamradionetwork.com/blog/am-radio-for-emergencies-a-must-have-resource-in-critical-times        

🎵 welcome back to the prep comms podcast caleb nelson k4 cdn your host here thanks so much for dropping by the show and giving a listen as we continue to walk through these developing conditions. It seems like every episode we have a new disaster, we have a new problem or whatnot to talk about. And this time through, we're going to have to date the program, August the 4th of 2024, we have almost Hurricane Debbie. She's a tropical storm right now off the Gulf Coast of Florida coming in, probably going to affect even the states of South Carolina, Georgia, maybe Tennessee with a lot of flooding following the storm, as well as who knows what else will come of it. As at least according to the models right now, middle of the day, Sunday, the 4th of August.

That means 10 days from now is my brother's birthday. So happy birthday squirrel. Hey, I did a, I did a post on Instagram and I'm going to go through that post right here for this program. This isn't the official episode for this week, but I wanted to go ahead and get this out. So if it's early, it's early and you can do with it what you will. You know, I don't want to be held to a schedule anyway. So I'm going to do as often as I can, get these programs to you and hope that you're enjoying them and listening to them and learning from them. Right. So anyway, Caleb Nelson, I'm here in the upstate of South Carolina. My wife and I have been married for over 25 years. We've got a small business. It's called the Hub City

Mercantile. We sell parts and filters and new systems and etc. Everything related to the Berkey, Birkfeld water filter systems. If you need any help with that, especially in the middle of a storm, we'd be happy to help you. I did a list the other day on Instagram. I call it the Storm Comms Checklist. I'm going to go through these things real quick on the program and just hit these highlights here real quick. One of the first things you should have regarding communications and preparations for a storm. Okay, hang on a minute. Before I go there, I know some of you in the Midwest don't have hurricanes. I know some of you in the upper Northwest don't deal with, I don't know, tornadoes or something. Everybody lives different places,

but everybody is faced with the same things that nature brings to you, whether it's wildfires in California, earthquakes on Madrid Falls. Just kidding. Superstorm Sandy up in the Northeast. You got Debbie approaching Florida right now. I mean, it can happen anywhere, anytime. And that was one of the reasons I created this. This timing with regards to this storm brought this to me. And, of course, we've been going through this on the program. But at the same time, don't let this storm that's, you know, being hyped on the TV news about this hurricane and whatnot affecting Florida and the East Coast of the U.S.

Don't let that just kind of dull your senses if you're in Oklahoma, if you are in Montana, if you're going through yourself as we're creating this program here, PrepComms. This is a StormComms checklist. And number one is your comms plan. Now, we haven't gotten that far in the program yet to develop a comms plan. But if you really think about it, what we've covered thus far is the foundation of your comms plan. All right. So what does a comms plan even look like? I'll tell you for my family, this is how it goes. We have a family emergency word. If someone hears that word spoken, or if they receive it via a text message, they know dad is serious, something is up. And if that happens, then they are to reply on their phones.

If you know the service is available, that they receive the message and immediately move to their vehicle to move home or to a closest safe space. In the midst of that, when they get in their vehicle, they start the vehicle, lock their doors. They immediately power on their amateur radio. My kids are amateur radio operators as well as my wife, so they have radios in their cars. They can call and talk legally, whatever. They begin calling for one of their family members.

Say, I got the message. I'm on the way. They're moving towards home or their nearest safe space. Whoever's home first powers on the base station announces that over the air and we call each other in to our safe spaces or our homes. That's a very quick rundown of what I actually put together on the back of a business card. My kids have them in their cars. Printed a larger one for a insurance card style size. All this is laminated in their vehicles, on their person, so they know what to do, when to do, and how to do it. That's a comms plan.

You may have little bitty kids that don't have phones, that don't need phones when they're that small. And it may be that just you and your husband are communicating with your in-laws to coordinate where everyone's going in case of a storm or a bad deal. Okay. This is something to think about. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out my buddies over at Mad Gear Co. He makes a fantastic contingency planner, and we're going to have him on the show down the road as we get into this PACE plan talking and whatnot, but I'll put a link in the show notes. Let me leave that there. That's the number one thing. You need a plan. We've talked about planning since we started the program, mindset, planning, implementation. The second thing that

a lot of people don't think about, and God bless her, my wife doesn't think about it either, is when you leave home, especially if you're going out of town or you're going to be overnight somewhere, to take a phone charger with you. just unplug it from the wall, get the cord, wrap it up, put it in your purse, put it in your overnight bag, have a spare, have a spare in your car. It makes a lot of sense to me, but maybe, maybe I'm the geek, right? Another thing that you need for your storm comms checklist is a charging cable or maybe a spare cable. Maybe you've got, uh, maybe you have an Android phone and your daughter has an iPhone, you know, make sure you have cables that coordinate with those types of phones. And if you end up somewhere and someone has a phone like yours, or maybe not even

like yours that needs to charge theirs, and you have the capacity and you have a spare cable, you can always share that, um, like in an airport. Just being common sense and courtesy here, right? Another thing that you need, and this really goes all the way back to the top of the comms plan, but I wanted to put it on the list to make people actually think about it, and that is to have a written list of contact telephone numbers. I have loads and loads of phone numbers stored in my head from just being a kid in the 1980s, but I struggle with my children's cell phone numbers today because it's just a button press. It's their icon on the start screen of my phone. I can speak to Google,

it'll dial them. So you get all that and you get to where you can't memorize those numbers. So in a comms plan, you would have these phone numbers there, right? But I wanted to put it on this list, like with a highlighter to say, Hey, do you have your mom's cell phone number memorized? It doesn't matter. Write it down on something with a list of numbers. You may need your work, the daycare, your church, your pastor, whoever, you know, write these telephone numbers down. And we're talking about the storm thing here and fold that up, put it away somewhere where you have it. Make sure your children, your spouse has these list of

numbers that they may need in case of an emergency. And I'm going to tell you in an emergent situation, our heads don't always think the straight way. So although you may remember your mom's telephone number and she still has a landline and that was the number you had when you were in third grade, if it's weird and you're stressed, it may be hard to dig it out. So if you have it written on a list, typed, preferably laminated, then that's going to help you a lot as you go through that situation. Another thing you have to have, you have to have flashlights. And I remember growing up as a kid,

my dad doesn't listen to the show, so I can say this, but my dad, we had flashlights in our house, but we never had batteries. I mean, if we were ever to need to go outside in the dark to like play hide and go seek or to, to go get the bicycle that we forgot out of someone's yard or something, just whatever. As children, we never had batteries. We had flashlights and no batteries. And maybe it was just because we were poor and we didn't know it, but we never had batteries. And if we did have a flashlight with batteries, it was seven eighths of the way dead. So get flashlights, get batteries, get flashlights, get batteries. And that doesn't mean you have to go buy, you know, like a surefire torch or something,

you know, a big thrower that's, you know, 9 million looms or something, you know, a nice handheld, small lantern that can collapse and go into your bag, put it in the, you know, the glove box of your car. There's a lot of ways to do it. It doesn't all have to be tactical. Okay. I mean, it needs to be practical over tactical. Did I just come up with a new podcast? Maybe. Anyway, you need practicality over tacticality and whatever will work for your situation. For instance, if you have little kids again, you don't need to give them nine million lumen lights, right? They can use a little pin, what we called a pin light battery when I was a kid, which is a triple A. Nowadays, you can buy them for dirt, nothing money at Harbor Freight Tool. And it's just a little LED with like a watch battery in it that

lasts, who knows how long, but it'll be great. It's a great sense of security. There's nothing like having your own source of light, especially when the power's out. So get flashlights, get batteries, and make sure they're working. Here we go. Episode number three, a working AM FM radio. Why do you want that? Well, you need to know what's going on. Go back to listen to episode three if you don't remember, but you need an AM FM radio and you need spare batteries for that radio. Now, if you're one of those hand crank guys, that's okay. Hand crank it, make sure you got some batteries to put in it because they usually work both ways. Here's the deal. You want an AM FM radio. You need to know what's going on around you. And in the local situation,

they will stop the music. They will stop the talk. They will stop the programming to tell you what's going on and how to be safe and where you can find supplies and whatnot. Don't depend on your cell phone in an emergency. Okay. AM FM radio with spare batteries. Next one's a weather radio. We've talked about that. Beat that horse to death is a super important accessory for your household. You know what? You can get an AM FM radio with a weather band and it may not do alerts, but you can still listen to the forecast, understand what's going on around you, understand the storm that has passed and maybe the storm that's approaching.

So those can be complimentary. They can be in the same unit themselves. Either way, AM FM radios, batteries, and weather radios are crazy important. Now, in an emergency, a lot of times the cell networks won't work. Sometimes they'll be partially working. Sometimes you just need to go down and check on the old lady four doors down from the house. Your phone may or may not be working. That's where the cheap handheld walkie talkies come in handy.

Handy talkies, as we call them in the amateur radio hobby. Listen, there's 9 million ways to do that one. We're going to talk about it on down the road in another program. But here's the deal. They're cheap. They're inexpensive. And they work great in some, in most cases, as long as they are powered. So you may consider, do I want to buy the ones with

the rechargeable batteries? Do I want to buy the ones I can add the AA batteries to? You've got to think through that before you get to this point. And we're going to talk about those important things later down the road, but here's the deal. You need an alternate means of communications. That's the crux behind this entire program is alternate communication. So if you have some, get them ready, make sure they work with each other, make sure they're on the same frequencies, make sure your channel one is her channel one. You may want to test and see how far around the neighborhood you can use those. It's kind of like a flashlight. We've gotten so used to having communications in our hands,

and we've gotten so used to having electricity that when one of those quits working, it puts us in panic mode. So a flashlight gives us security. We can create our own light in case of an emergency and a little walkie talkie that we can talk to our spouse as we're checking on a neighbor or vice versa. That gives us a little connectivity. It makes us feel better. It gives us a safety blanket and we feel better about things going on around us. The next one up is a laptop or a tablet. Most everybody has at least one or two of those. The reason they're on the list is if you wind up somewhere and you need internet connectivity or you need to send an email to someone or check your Facebook or post yourself safe from Hurricane Debbie, whatever, you can do

that with your laptop and or a tablet in case your phone's not working. If you find internet somewhere, maybe your phone's damaged, maybe you lose it. Here's the thing. We're going through alternate communications here. Email posting on social media and whatnot is all important, especially when you have the capacity to do that. A laptop, a tablet works just like, and better in my opinion than your phone. So take those with you. Make sure you have the chargers and you know what? It never hurts to have it charged right now in case you need to use it later. I find myself all the time with my Samsung tablet that I very rarely ever use. The moment I do need to do need to, or want to use it, I can't because I haven't charged

it and maintain the battery. So charge those things now, plug them in, get them started, get it done. Last on this list is spare chargers. And I put that on there going right back to the beginning of the list. It may be that, uh, you have two outlets in your car that you can charge phones through. And if you had a spare charger, you can charge your neighbor's phone, or maybe, uh, you end up somewhere and you really need to charge your phone, but someone else is using it. Look, one is none, two is one. So always have spares. You can get on amazon.com. You can order a spare charger for your phone. They're very inexpensively acquired that way. And they work, they work just fine. So make sure you have the

correct cables and the correct chargers and that's the end of my list and that's not the end of a list but that's the end of my storm comms list and the reason i put this list together again was to kind of make folks think oh uh the storm's coming i need to get ready of course there's just a gazillion things to do board up the house put the sandbags in place, fill up the gas cans, buy the dog food, pick up the stuff off the floor, all these things that you could be doing. This is stuff that can already be done. This is stuff that could be sitting there waiting for you if you had taken 30 minutes, 45 minutes, two hours, hour and a half to get ready before the

storm showed up. And I'm not talking just about hurricanes. I'm talking about everyday life. We've lived it in my house. Everyday life can bring you a storm. But when you go through these things and you have lists and whatnot set up for you, a system is what a list is, it'll help you process and get through that situation a lot quicker. Listen, I'm praying for you guys, wherever you're at, especially those that are going to be affected by this storm coming this week.

Remember to love on your neighbors, help your neighbors, check on your neighbors. You know, that's part of a plan too, that we're going to talk about down the road, but here's the deal guys. We're all in this together. When it happens, we all need each other. So give the list a look. It'll be in the show notes and I'll be back next time. We're going to talk about another alternative means of communications, but until then 73, I'm praying for you guys. God bless you. See you later. so so Hub City Mercantile is a real-life brick-and-mortar store located in Spartanburg, South Carolina. It's also the official sponsor of this program, PrepComs.

And additionally, it's also an authorized dealer and representative for the Dalton and British Birkfeld water filter systems. My wife and I have been in business for well over 25 years, and we've recently added the Dalton and British Birkfeld water filter systems to our store. So if you have some water filter system needs, if you need some replacement parts, some replacement filters, maybe you don't even have a water filter solution right now. Make sure you visit hubcitymercantile.com hubcitymercantile.com.